"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010

Monday, July 17, 2017

Hate Mail - "What do you offer as a replacement?"

I am challenged to come up with an alternative to psychology and psychiatry in the face of my criticism of it. Well, to start with, coming up with a replacement for those is neither a required burden of their critics in order for their criticism to be valid nor is it any kind of defense as to their legitimacy as sciences.

The mere desirability of having something doesn't mean that you will ever have it nor that the materialist god which such attitudes turn science into can provide it. It would be desirable for medicine to have a certain, absolutely reliable, completely effective and affordable cure for many conditions and illnesses but those aren't available for physical illnesses and medical science has had a spotty record on producing cures - though in their case far higher than the success rates of psychiatry or, heaven help us, psychotherapeutic industry.

That it might be a nice thing (or not) for scientists to have a neat and tidy methodology for coming up with universal truths about human minds using accurate observation, accurate measurement of relevant components and a clear and accurate analysis of the results which will be agreed to by the social-sci community on the basis of scientific rigor. The desirability of that is what kept the thing going since it was allowed into universities under the pretense that it was a science. But that doesn't change anything about the fact that such methods don't exist and that the nature of minds make them unavailable for direct or even indirect observation, any attempt to get to them dependent on the entirely untestable self-reporting of people who may or may not be accurate or truthful and countless other flaws in the claim to be practicing science being glaring and controlling of any such an effort.

The replacement of scientific rigor - or its possibility - with the erection of schools of thought based on competing and varying claims made by authorities - sometimes having more to do with their talent as a creative writer or which prestigious institution they work their fraud from, is a sure sign that the claimed methods of science are not present to produce that hall mark of the genuine product, results which are good enough to compel acceptance through rigorous review. I think these days you can say the same thing about much of the subatomic theory such as Peter Woit critisizes and the cosmology which has become an exercise in ideological promotion instead of addressing observable nature. I think the entire thing might be analogous to the long reign of ptolemaic cosmology only to be overturned as newer mathematical and observational methods, a better historical record, etc. overturned it. If those hadn't been available that progress in knowledge wouldn't be possible. Where such are not available, science can't really be done. The character of the fully developed, widely accepted late ptolemaic cosmology is impressive in its ingenuity in the face of a lack of such evidence as gave a better picture of the actual position of the sun and planets.

I suspect that in the future the entire enterprise of the social sciences will be increasingly seen as a fraud due to the pseudo-scientific practices it inevitably relies on and our generations will be seen as quaintly gullible. Though that's a suspicion which must take into account that it's entirely possible that generations into an imagined future will be as prone to the same arrogant assumption that they have made a clean break with such superstitions and mass delusions of the past. Ours certainly has been sold that tripe, much of that sale being made by hucksters in the social sciences and using them in scribbling out academic theory. Much of it overtly ideological, a promotion of atheist-materialism through the promotion of scientism.

One of the results of doing a deeper reading, informed by the observations of such scholars as Brueggemann and Heschel and others, is the surprising discovery that we are not really much if at all advanced on those of the Biblical past. Our depravities take only a slightly different form in some cases, our sins are just about exactly the same ones addressed, individually and, especially on a societal and national level as confessed to and protested against by the Prophets. Only ours has a scientific pretense at absolute knowledge based on a relatively few successes in treating non living, physical objects and applying that knowledge, just as the discoveries of early metal workers were applied then. The absurd and unwarranted extension of those methods of the physical sciences to things they can't be applied to deceives instead of enlightens. The so-called enlightenment was just a flickering of the shadows on the cave wall, it wasn't a blast of light leading us away from the dark and terrible past. Look at the body counts from the science informed wars of the 20th century if you want hard proof of that. Look at the global warming which might well kill us all. It as well as atomic weapons, chemical pollution, etc. is a product of science and technology at the service of all too human greed and lies for the benefit of our Pharaonic class of power holders. The Prophets were the real advance made against that depravity, the rest is just tech geekery.

On Comments

This is a blog for adults and I intend to keep it that way.

I've been forced to go back to moderating comments since some people abused the privilege. Adulthood confers privileges that childishness shouldn't. Please be patient, barring accidents, any comment that should be posted will be.

ABOUT MUSIC VIDEOS

I post music videos to inspire you to support living, working musicians, to buy their recordings so they can continue with their music and to buy the recordings of artists who have passed so their music will be preserved and available into the future.

About Me

I am a gay man, a religious man, an equality absolutist, a democrat, and a primitive socialist who believes that the means of production are by right in the ownership of those who produce wealth. I am an environmentalist of the extreme kind who is convinced that the way things are going now will lead to the extinction of people, of many other species of life for the benefit of a pathologically greedy elite who must be stopped and leveled with the rest of us. If that's not radical enough, I believe that reality is real and that most of what gets called liberalism and leftism in the United States is an impotent fraud based in fashion and the conceit of a bunch of elitists who delight in despising people they consider beneath them. Thus the political impotence of that style of pseudo-liberalism which is merely a liberalish-libertarianism. My heroes include Shirley Chisholm, Martin Luther King jr. the liberation theologians, and a few politicians, Senator Whitehouse and Sanders, many of the members of the Congressional progressive and black caucuses and other politicians who actually struggle to change laws and make real lives really better.

On Being Disreputable

After seven years of being told that what I've said is beyond the bounds of ... something, they're hardly ever specific, and that I'm just awful, I've decided to go with that.